Jan 18, 2016

The Busy Person's Guide To Everyday Enlightenment by Janey Bowyer

The Busy Person’s Guide to Everyday Enlightenment is the perfect antidote to the strains of modern living.

Featuring easy-to-follow meditations, yoga sequences, techniques and holistic advice that you can apply to even the busiest of lifestyles.

What makes this book different is that it is tailored to recognise in this time of hectic living that we all have the need to nurture, care and centre ourselves, yet we don’t always have the time for long practices to achieve this. Ironically, the very thing we have convinced ourselves we don’t have time to do - looking after ourselves - is what can lead to better health and a sense of inner calm.

Within these pages, you will find easy-to-follow sequences.
This book is a helping hand to those who wish to fit in some me-time self-care even into the most time-starved of lifestyles.

You can learn to…

• Develop techniques in as little as 5 minutes a day that can help you deal with stress
• Turn everyday stressful situations into meditation just by shifting your perspective
• Nourish your body with simple yoga schedules that can help target specific areas or states of mind, no matter how busy you are
• Bring the holistic into the hectic and learn to Zen out when the rest of the world is rushing
• Improve and progress with the help of handy tips
• Enjoy guilt-free self-nurturing

I grew up on a hill in the north of England. From a young age, I wanted to live in London. As a child, during the depths of night, I'd often listen to the hum of passing trains. Sometimes I'd run to my bedroom window hoping to catch a glimpse so that I could pretend that I too was travelling on one, speeding along, London bound, like the rest of the world was sleeping.

So one day in my late teens, I bought a one-way ticket and travelled to London with just £30.00 in my pocket and a bit of blind faith.

In my novel The Last Days of Lisa, (that I’m still writing), the main character Lisa mirrors how overwhelming it was for me to see London for the first time through the eyes of a teenager travelling alone….

‘London never rests, she thinks. It’s on speed. A vortex, absorbing everything. Running from its own stench but also basking in it. Seemingly superficial and plastic to those not enchanted by its ambivalent charms. London has a soul; a ravenous appetite that feeds on the egos of the thousands that flock here each day to get closer to their dreams. ‘

Not long after moving to London, yoga and writing graced my life. I think they both saved me. On the writing front the spark came after reading the book, Catcher in the Rye. I’d not had the opportunity to study much as a child but that didn’t matter now as this book blew me away.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of c—p, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” J.D Salinger

As for yoga, another book in the form of a second-hand yoga book written back in the 1960’s made its way into my mitts via a second-hand bookstore.

As I’d said earlier, to start with I wasn’t very good at either. Dyslexia and lack of flexibility and poor posture were my obstacles. I could see beyond that though as both yoga and writing offered me hope and possibilities that before this I hadn’t ever thought possible. Before yoga and writing I believed I was useless and had nothing to offer the world.

So I worked hard at studying for more than a decade. The author John Harding was the first teacher to believe in me. After studying writing under his inspiring tuition, I even managed to get a few novels published along the way.

On the yoga side, I studied both Hatha and later Kundalini yoga and despite not being naturally flexible nor a person who liked to sit still. It was in India back in 2004 that I had my first awakening experience.

During all this time, I also managed over the years to work my way up from an office junior job to a finally a supervisor position, having worked for most of my life in a string of unfulfilling office jobs. The good news that in October 2015 I left office work to become The Word Sprite full time!

The silver lining in all of this is through my personal experience of having to be creative with my time I came up with the concept of yoga and holistic solutions for modern day living. Hence, this is how The Word Sprite was born!